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Later, when Italian authorities refused permission for the plane to land, he changed his mind and decided to call Italian prime minister Bettino Craxi. “But we couldn’t get through to him,” Poindexter recalls. Michael Ledeen, an NSA Middle East consultant who was in the Situation Room, called one of Craxi’s aides and browbeat him into divulging that the prime minister was off with his mistress, which is where Reagan eventually got through to him to brief him on the mission. Reluctantly, Craxi agreed to let the plane land, but only after Reagan promised that the hijackers would be prosecuted in Italy.
It took some time for the F-14s to locate Egyptair 2483. They intercepted several other planes before they found the right one, in the air off Crete. Creeping up on either side of the jet, they positioned themselves on the end of each wing and behind the tail, switched on their lights, then identified themselves to the pilot of the jet. “You are to follow us and land immediately at Sigonella,” they instructed him, using an international frequency reserved for skirmishes.
Less than an hour later, the plane was on the ground at Sigonella. American troops surrounded the jet, only to find themselves in turn surrounded by Italian soldiers, rifles drawn. It was an armed standoff. The U.S. squad was told it had no right to use the base for anything other than NATO activities. Cap Weinberger was on the phone to Carl Steiner, the Navy colonel in charge of the force in Sicily. “Can you get the terrorists off and onto one of our planes?” Weinberger asked. Steiner replied, “Well, Mr. Secretary, I can do that, but I will have to shoot my way through a line of carabinieri.” It wasn’t until Prime Minister Craxi weighed in that the hijackers and their PLO escorts were handcuffed and led away.
The president was ecstatic with the results of the mission. It had come off exactly as planned, a pinpoint operation with no leaks, no casualties, and no American hostages being held. As a senior White House aide pointed out, it was “a God-sent opportunity” and helped to alter the impression of many Americans that their government was “virtually helpless in the face of terrorism.” Ronald Reagan resolved to capitalize on the outcome. At a hastily arranged press conference the next afternoon, he trumpeted the capture of the hijackers, offering “a message to terrorists everywhere: ‘You can run, but you can’t hide,’” the motto of one of his boyhood heroes, boxer Joe Louis. Newspapers in France and Egypt condemned Reagan as “the cowboy,” eager to pull the trigger in dangerous situations. Italians were furious at his “reckless trespass” on their soil.* But it played well at home. Reagan’s approval ratings rose from the mid-50s to almost 70 percent, literally overnight. Across America, Republicans and Democrats alike celebrated an inspirational victory considered “a major turning point in the hostage era.”
The only person not rejoicing in the aftermath was Bud McFarlane, who was tying up loose ends on the intelligence side. Throughout the week of October 14, he sat stone-faced in front of his television set as a succession of political “grandstanders,” as he called them, made the rounds of the morning talk shows, heaping praise on the president and his operatives in the affair. One particular exchange brought McFarlane out of his chair. “The president’s done a great job,” boasted Dave Durenberger, the Republican senator from Minnesota. “Fortunately, we had an agent in Mubarak’s office.”
We had an agent in Mubarak’s office.
McFarlane couldn’t believe his ears. The CIA had shared that detail with a delegation of senators, but made it clear the information was top secret and especially sensitive. McFarlane knew the outcome of Durenberger’s “outrageous” blunder. “That guy in Mubarak’s office is dead,” he told himself at the time. His suspicion was confirmed. “Our agent in Egypt was never heard from again.”
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The Achille Lauro affair kept the glare off the transfer of arms to Iran. The Middle East operation proceeded apace with more weapons sales to grease the wheels. Throughout the fall, Oliver North, now running the show, negotiated with Manucher Ghorbanifar on another secret transaction, which would send a total of 120 sophisticated HAWK antiaircraft missiles to Iran in exchange for more hostages—one French and five Americans. North was also overseeing the covert supply of military aid to the Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.
North, at Bill Casey’s insistence, enlisted a consultant to run the supply chains, a master of covert operations—Richard V. Secord, a veteran of the CIA’s secret war in Laos, one-time chief adviser to the shah’s air force in Iran, and latterly something of an arms merchant himself. Subsequently, Secord was dealing in Iranian government contracts, working in tandem with the CIA. He was perfectly positioned to buy weapons for the Contras—antiaircraft missiles from China, ammunition from Romania, and plastic explosives from Portugal. He’d also directed a shipment of AK-47 rifles from Poland to a Honduran port. And he was marking up his commission at a 30 percent profit. North also looped in Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, the CIA’s head of European covert operations, who had access to clandestine diplomatic and transportation channels.
Oliver North kept a close grip on U.S. operations in Nicaragua via a covert operations group known as the Restricted Interagency Group, or RIG, basically three highly placed administration officials who issued orders to support the Nicaraguan resistance to the ambassadors of Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Honduras. Wealthy Republicans such as Joseph Coors, Ross Perot, Nelson Bunker Hunt, and Barbara Newington had already donated hundreds of thousand of dollars to the cause, diverted to a Swiss bank account controlled by North in the name of Lake Resources. By October 1985, the account bulged with almost $2 million in contributions.
In the meantime, Ronald Reagan was focused on his upcoming summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. There hadn’t been significant face-to-face dialogue between the two heads of state in more than six years. This summit seemed to promise a breakthrough—“without grand expectations,” as Gorbachev predicted, but meaningful, perhaps even a turning point in U.S.-Soviet relations. On October 24, 1985, Reagan addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations, declaring, “When Mr. Gorbachev and I meet in Geneva next month, I look to a fresh start in the relationship of our two nations.” The president had reason for qualified optimism. The rhetoric already coming out of the Kremlin was encouraging, and his top aides delivered an upbeat analysis. Gorbachev, they told him, was “from a distinctly different mold” than that of his predecessors; he wasn’t a rock-hard ideologue. “In Gorbachev, we were clearly dealing with a new kind of man,” George Shultz concluded, “one ready to make radical changes but not ready to bring the Soviet Union in real parity—in terms of missiles and warheads—with us.” The stumbling block was the SDI program—Star Wars—which tormented Gorbachev. “Was it science fiction, a trick to make the Soviet Union more forthcoming, or merely a crude attempt to lull us in order to carry out the mad enterprise—the creation of a shield which would allow a first strike without fear of retaliation?” He didn’t know. And Reagan didn’t know how much leeway he had in his endeavor to negotiate with this man. “What is Gorbachev made of?” he wondered. “What are the influences that have shaped his life? Let’s find out everything we can about his family.”
In an effort to size up his Soviet counterpart, Reagan sent George Shultz and Bud McFarlane to Moscow for an intimate meeting with Gorbachev in his private office on November 4, 1985. The Americans found the new premier in “a feisty mood.” He went on the attack from the moment they were seated, and sought to demonstrate how well informed he was about the U.S. and its political system, but he wasn’t shrill or dogmatic, and all in all the diplomats were encouraged.
Some of Gorbachev’s information was wildly inaccurate. “I am familiar with the U.S. economy and it is strong,” he said, “but of course it relies totally on your aerospace industry.” Shultz couldn’t help but chuckle at the misconception. McFarlane said, “To give the general secretary an idea about the role of aerospace, if we closed all the factories in our country this year it would only affect about
six percent of the GDP.” A disbelieving Gorbachev nearly came out of his seat. “This cannot be true,” he said. “I am informed—this is just false.” But they could see that he was agitated. “We knew then that the Soviet intelligence system was not informing their leadership about the true extent of our economy and military industrial complex,” McFarlane recalls. “And two weeks later, in Geneva, it was clear that Gorbachev had taken the KGB to task about the productivity of the United States in nondefense areas.”
But Gorbachev remained unmoved in his conviction about SDI. “SDI obviously hit a raw nerve,” Shultz observed. He let the U.S. delegation know in no uncertain terms that they could expect no slack from him when it came to discussing missile reduction and arms treaties. “The Soviet Union will only compromise on the condition that there is no militarization of space,” Gorbachev stated. Otherwise, he said, nothing would come of the negotiation. “If you want superiority through your SDI, we will not help you. . . . We will not reduce our offensive missiles. We will engage in a buildup that will break your shield.”
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Afterward, Shultz called his boss in the White House. “Gorbachev,” he reported, “wasn’t going to be a pushover.” The SDI ultimatum was going to be a sticking point, and he had reinforced his deep commitment to Communism as an ideology.” Still, Gorbachev seemed receptive to reducing nuclear weapons. It was substantially more encouraging than when Jimmy Carter sent his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, to Moscow with a message that the president wanted to reduce nuclear weapons, and the Soviets laughed him out of the room. There was an outside chance that Gorbachev would move the needle toward disarmament, but Shultz wondered aloud if the most they could hope to expect from the Soviet premier in Geneva was an agreement to hold another summit.
That wasn’t all right by Nancy Reagan. She urged her husband to push beyond just making nice with the Russians. She told him, “Thanks to what you’ve done in your first term, you are in a position to get something accomplished, but it has to be more than ‘peace in our time.’ It has to be something that will last beyond your term in office.” She was emphatic about this throughout 1984, and even more so in 1985 as Geneva grew near. Taking Bud McFarlane aside during a dinner-and-movie night in the residence, she said, “I want you to tell Ronnie he has an opportunity here—he has an obligation—to engage and to listen. He has a chance to make history here. He’s got to get a treaty. Make sure he understands that.” It was safe to say that he did.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“A FRESH START”
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
—THOMAS PAINE (Often Quoted by Ronald Reagan)
Ronald Reagan was noticeably edgy about his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. On the night flight to Geneva on November 16, 1985, the president sat alone in the front compartment of Air Force One, somber and untalkative, buried in briefings, his shirt clinging limply to his broad shoulders. He was oblivious to the festive stir at the back of the plane, where his wife “bounced around, joking with the staff and the press, her mood uncharacteristically loose.”
The summit was Nancy Reagan’s prize success. For more than a year, she had relentlessly pressed her husband to meet with the Soviets. Margaret Thatcher’s Camp David appraisal of Gorbachev had teed it up for the First Lady. This man was a leader very much like the president, she thought, compassionate, a visionary, who had the potential to transcend the rigid Soviet bureaucracy and be a different kind of leader. He’d already demonstrated his willingness to compromise by announcing a reduction of SS-20 missiles fixed on European targets. Now the Reagans were headed to Geneva with world peace the ultimate pursuit. World peace—it would seal Ronald Reagan’s legacy. Nancy Reagan couldn’t have been more excited.
The entourage had in fact left Washington on a discouraging note. The day they took off, the Washington Post and the New York Times published a letter from Cap Weinberger to the president urging him to renounce the SALT II treaty, signed by Carter and Brezhnev in 1979, and not to give ground on SDI. The disclosure shattered the administration’s carefully cultivated image of unity. On the surface, it seemed as though the letter was leaked to deliberately sabotage the summit. Insiders suspected the hand of Bill Casey, who argued vehemently against any efforts to improve relations with the Soviets. A few suspected the leak came from Weinberger himself, as revenge for not being invited to attend the summit. He’d been excluded to give George Shultz a free hand in negotiating the variables of a jam-packed agenda—covering trade, bilateral relations, human rights, and regional disagreements—inasmuch as diplomacy traditionally leads with State, not Defense. Moreover, the president had stressed the importance of presenting an image to the Soviets devoid of any trace of hostility or muscle-flexing. “Goodwill without illusion” was his mantra. In any case, Weinberger’s letter cast an awkward pall over the U.S. delegation, which had spent months preparing for the meetings.
And no one had prepared more than Ronald Reagan. He had been working for months to get on top of the summit’s talking points. He had no illusions about his lack of Soviet expertise. Aside from his long-held convictions about the USSR’s corrupt communist doctrine, he knew relatively little about the nation’s mode of governance, its weapons, or its capabilities. “I want to know things that count,” he told his aides. “What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are their vulnerabilities, economically as well as politically? Find out all you can about the relationship between the Party and the military.” He knew he’d have to dust off his skills as a negotiator. “Go back and put together a précis on Soviet negotiating style,” he requested of his intelligence team, “both in terms of grand strategy and human terms.” He wanted to absorb and understand these topics in order to have the confidence to engage with and negotiate the larger issues.
Between the spring of 1985 and the following November, Donald Fortier, a deputy national security adviser, prepared twelve tutorials for Reagan in answer to his request. Each contained no more than a dozen pages—big-picture topics that covered modern Soviet history, the KGB and the military, the country’s economy, its resources, and Gorbachev’s roots and strengths. Reagan devoured them with great enthusiasm. He annotated their margins, dog-eared the pages, and made copies for George Bush, Ed Meese, Don Regan, and Jim Baker. He also held regular meetings with Suzanne Massie, an authority on Russian culture. The president delighted in sharing the information he’d gleaned—about the Soviet Union’s agricultural challenges, its vulnerability to seasonal change and how a drought could take food off the table countrywide; how it had an A-plus aerospace team; how its wealth of metals allowed it to do extravagant things, such as build an entire submarine out of titanium that could emit tones at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. This gluttony for Sovietology made Cap Weinberger and Richard Perle nervous as cats. They worried that once the president got to Geneva he would give away the store. The policy issues were only part of his goal. “I want to get to know this guy,” Reagan said, referring to Gorbachev. “We’re going to have to deal with him for a long time, and it’s important I get to know him.” He was convinced that if he could sit down, look Gorbachev in the eye, and talk to him, the larger issues would fall into place. Geneva, as he saw it, was a place “to make a fresh start.”
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The president took two free days to unwind. He and Nancy settled into the Maison de Saussure, an eighteenth-century lakeside château borrowed from Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, the Swiss-born imam of Shia Muslims and a mainstay on the Forbes list of wealthiest men in the world. The setting was magnificent, with a mazy sweep of formal grounds and a distant view of the snow-capped Alps. The couple took long strolls in the garden, acclimating themselves to the six-hour time change, and reviewed details for the four-day event. Nancy had Joan Quigley prepare Gorbachev’s horoscope before they left Washington. And Reagan took time out to feed the goldfish there, as per a note left fo
r him by the Aga Khan’s young son, Hussein. (Apparently not well enough, as one of them died while he was there.)
On Tuesday morning, November 19, 1985, the president was ready to go. He paced impatiently before leaving the château. “Are you ready, Dad?” asked his son Ron, who was in Geneva on assignment for Playboy. “Absolutely,” the president responded. In the motorcade on the way to the summit, he remained silent, lost in thought.
It was an overcast morning, unseasonably cold. Bitter winds had swept across the city, sending local residents cowering indoors. The weather didn’t stop the crush of international press. More than three thousand journalists converged on the scene, held back by double rows of baton-wielding Swiss police. A horde of TV crews jockeyed for position. The summit itself was held at the Villa Fleur d’Eau, an elegant Georgian stone mansion that overlooked a picturesque expanse of Lac Léman. Nancy Reagan had signed off on the location, attracted by its intimate pool house with a fireplace on the fringe of the grounds, where she encouraged her husband to buttonhole Mikhail Gorbachev for a one-on-one talk.
Reagan arrived a few minutes early for the scheduled 10:00 a.m. start. Word circulated among those gathered that the Russian delegation was ten minutes out. Standing in the ornate foyer, the president eyeballed his appearance in the mirrored wall panels and waved over his valet, Eddie Serrano. “Eddie, can I have my coat and scarf?” Jim Kuhn, Reagan’s personal assistant, felt an internal alarm. “We were very photo-conscious,” Kuhn recalls. He had glanced outside moments earlier at the vast sea of press from around the world poised on risers in front of the entrance to capture the ceremonial greeting. “Reagan looked outstanding,” Kuhn recalls. “He had on a finely tailored blue suit; he was perfectly groomed. He looked very much like an aging movie star.” But, Kuhn thought, if the fifty-four-year-old Gorbachev gets out of his car without a coat on, looking spry, the seventy-four-year-old Reagan all bundled up was going to get killed in the footage.